How the home of Mini Rolls and Smash was gobbled up

Food factory workers facing the the sack will march on Saturday for an economy that values more than just money

Among the thousands of people who join the big anti-cuts march this Saturday will be a coach load from Wirral. Though where they live has been suffering from the public-sector axe since 2009, their cause is less about austerity than a story that extends from the looming closure of a 60-year old biscuit factory into the byzantine workings of the modern business. Given that the demonstration – organised by the TUC – is titled the "March for the alternative", they surely have something crucial to contribute: an argument not just against cuts, but the kind of flimsy, imbalanced economy that makes millions of people even more vulnerable to them.

The Burton's Foods factory has been in the pinched suburb of Moreton since 1953. For the first 30 years of its life, with a workforce peaking at nearly 5,000, the factory was part of the confectionery empire run by Cadbury's, with an enlightened labour relations model and an array of fondly loved brands that tumbled from its production lines: Mini Rolls, Chocolate Fingers, Smash instant mash.

But in 1986, there was a management buyout, and its troubled second act began. Since then, the company that renamed itself Burton's Foods has switched owners at least five times, and a recent private equity buyout saddled the firm with very serious debts. Now the biggest shareholders are the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and a multinational finance outfit called Apollo Global Management. Burton's biscuit production turns a profit, and life for its board seems very nice indeed. Last year, directors' pay rose by an average of 97.5%, and the most handsome package went up by 119.9%.

There are no such glad tidings in Moreton. After serially cutting production here, the company now plans to close the factory with the loss of 342 jobs. Worse still, Wirral borough council is set on shedding more than a thousand people – a sixth of its payroll – by the summer, and for every local job vacancy there are currently 17 applicants. When George Osborne delivers Wednesday's budget, he will doubtless point to supposed sunlit uplands of recovery, and perhaps underline his belief that, as he hacks back the public sector, private firms will fill the gap. Not here.

I came to Wirral after we appealed on Comment is free for word from the frontline of British trade unionism. On the thread that followed, hostile voices ("unions need to be crushed") took issue with more supportive contributors ("people have a fundamental right to collectively improve their lot"), and a few people mentioned the dreamy idea of European-style social partnership, whereby British labour relations might lose their traditionally adversarial charge.

In Moreton, on the union's side at least, that has happened. For four of the last 10 years the workforce has agreed to a pay freeze. Since 2001 they have delivered £12.7m of cost savings, while the success of the lines they produce has often skyrocketed. In 2007, when closure was first suggested and the Unite union led a successful campaign – without a strike – to save the factory, at the cost of 500 jobs, the firm promised to turn one production line into "a centre of excellence", and not to attempt any more big changes before May 2012. To quote the local MP, the shadow Treasury minister Angela Eagle: "None of the workforce could have done any better – and what is their reward? The sack."

Listening to people who fear being left at the mercy of a non-existent job market, I was struck by one thought: as far as mainstream politics is concerned, talking about the root of this place's predicament is clearly off limits. Yet ideas are out there: Unite talks about working at an EU level to give deals struck with employees legal force, so the shadowy financial interests that control increasing parts of the economy cannot always devastate communities on a whim. More generally, there is the kind of enlightened business approach urged last weekend by Andrew Witty, the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, who bemoaned not only corporate tax avoidance, but the entire economic culture in which bottom lines are relentlessly pushed downwards, and the social costs are always someone else's concern.

Witty summed up the great misstep of business over the last 20 years: "They've allowed it to be perceived that it's all about money. It shouldn't be about that … We want to make a return, yes – we're not a charity. We want to make a good return for our shareholders. But we're going to do it by being in step with society."

Somewhere in those words, even if he himself may not know it, there is not just a pithy diagnosis of what has gone wrong, but a tantalising hint of how things could be different. Not the standard free-market cartoon of a world returned to the 1970s, but corporate social responsibility pushed beyond the odd bit of charity, and politicians on the left realising that if they think seriously – and internationally – about all this, some business people might not be quite as hostile as they think.

To echo the title of the big march, there is an alternative. But on a grey day in Moreton, it seems light years away: distant, theoretical, and no compensation for the blows to come.